DebianOn is an effort to document how to install, configure and use Debian on some specific hardware. Therefore potential buyers would know if that hardware is supported and owners would know how get the best out of that hardware.

The purpose is not to duplicate the Debian Official Documentation, but to document how to install Debian on some specific hardware.

Important Note

Configuration

Display

Works out of the box

As with all Linux machines using an NVIDIA GPU, you have the option of using the open-source Nouveau display driver, or the proprietary NVIDIA display driver. Unfortunately the Nouveau driver is a lot slower and less-featured than the proprietary driver, so you will typically be better off with the NVIDIA proprietary blob than Nouveau.

Note: This laptop can come with NVIDIA Optimus (ie: both an integrated Intel GPU and a discrete NVIDIA GPU in the one laptop), so this allows you to potentially obtain good battery life (when on Intel GPU) as well as high-performance 3D graphics (when on NVIDIA GPU), but Optimus is not fully supported in Linux by NVIDIA yet, so you may want to use Bumblebee for now.

Note: Lenovo ?ThinkPad W520 has a bug in the "NVIDIA discrete mode" BIOS setting, so you should disable "VT-x" in the BIOS settings if you want to use Discrete Mode for GPU (ie: disable the Intel GPU and only use the NVIDIA GPU). Disabling VT-x can potentially reduce performance of virtual machines, such as VirtualBox or KVM.